“Looks like she has some sort of abrasion here,” he says, noting a scraped area on the handprint between the shoulder blades. “Some inflammation.”
“I’m not clear on all the details,” Dr. Lonsdale replies. “It’s not my case.”
“Looks as if it was painted after she got the scrape,”Bentonsays. “Am I seeing welts, too?”
“Maybe some localized swelling. Histology should answer that. It’s not my case,” he reminds them. “I didn’t participate in her autopsy,” he is sure to remind them. “I glanced at her. That was it before I just now rolled her out. I did look over the autopsy report.”
Should the chief’s work be negligent or incompetent, he’s not about to take the blame.
“Any idea how long she’s been dead?”Bentonasks.
“Well, the cold temperatures would have slowed rigor.”
“Frozen when she was found?”
“Not yet. Apparently, her body temperature when she got here was thirty-eight degrees. Fahrenheit. I didn’t go to the scene. I can’t give you those details.”
“The temperature atten o’clockthis morning was twenty-one degrees,” Thrush tellsBenton. “The weather conditions are on the disk I gave you.”
“So the autopsy report has already been dictated,”Bentonsays.
“It’s on the disk,” Thrush answers.
“Trace evidence?”
“Some soil, fibers, other debris adhering to blood,” Thrush replies. “I’ll get them run in the labs as quick as I can.”
“Tell me about the shotgun shell you recovered,”Bentonsays to him.
“Inside her rectum. You couldn’t see it from the outside, but it showed up on x-ray. Damnest thing. When they first showed me the film, I thought maybe the shell was under her body on the x-ray tray. Had no idea the damn thing was inside her.”
“What kind?”
“Remington Express Magnum, twelve-gauge.”
“Well, if she shot herself, she’s certainly not the one who shoved the shell up her rectum after the fact,”Bentonsays. “You running it through NIBIN?”
“Already in the works,” Thrush says. “The firing pin left a nice drag mark. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
8
Early the next morning, snow blows sideways overCape CodBayand melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy’s windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.
Lucy shouldn’t have gone toLorraine’s last night. She wishes she hadn’t and can’t stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here toProvincetowna week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. She watches Stevie’s regular breathing.
“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”
She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren’t frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can’t believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.
“Stevie, wake up. I’ve got to get going,” she says loudly.
Stevie doesn’t stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself no more, and then nights like last night happen and it isn’t smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?
How could Johnny be dead?
She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.
I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.
“You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.
Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang.380 pistol on the table by the bed.
“Come on, wake up.”
Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God no.
When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there inGainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.
Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.
He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.
He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.
That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.
“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”
“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.
Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.
“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”
The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.